“While many Americans cook at home, they come to the table with different skill sets and motivations for doing so. Marketers should acknowledge that each Cooking Enthusiast has her own approach to meal preparation and give her opportunities to customize recipes and use resources that make cooking the easiest and most fun for her.”

– Gretchen Grabowski, Travel & Leisure Analyst

This report looks at the following areas:

Who cooks and how often

What it means to be a Cooking Enthusiast

Approaches to cooking

Reasons to cook at home

What may have initially been motivated out of financial necessity during the difficult economy, enthusiasm for cooking has not dissipated—in fact, cooking at home, and pride in culinary skills and preparing original meals, appears to have gained in popularity over the past few years. Most Americans spend at least some time cooking at home, and many say that they enjoy it.

Some 46% of Mintel respondents are categorized as Cooking Enthusiasts. If translated to the U.S. population, this percentage would equate to 111 million Americans. The vast majority of Cooking Enthusiasts want to have a personalized experience in the kitchen and make creative, customized meals of which they can feel proud. Cooking skill level, reasons for cooking at home, and resources used to learn new recipes depend on a variety of factors, such as gender, age, and parental status.

The report measures the frequency with which consumers cook from scratch, as well as their attitudes toward cooking, their cooking skill level, and their motivations for cooking at home. Consumer data also cover how respondents define a Cooking Enthusiast, their typical cooking habits, and resources for learning to cook something new. General attitudes toward cooking at home are also discussed.

For the purposes of this report, a Cooking Enthusiast is defined as a respondent who cooks at least occasionally (one to two times per week), either “likes” or “loves” cooking, has at least basic cooking skills, and typically cooks because he or she wants to rather than out of need.

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Figure 24: Cooking frequency, attitudes, skill, and motivation, by presence of children in household, July-August 2013

Families drawn to low-cost ways to eat healthy at home

Figure 25: Average number of times low- and middle-income families eat healthy dinners at home in a typical week, by gender of food decision maker, household size, and number of children in the household, December 2011